Is there a way to create discussion boards without having my profile picture/name show up as the creator?

We are trying to create discussion boards for professors but are running into the problem of having our information show up as the creators of the board rather than a generic profile picture or the instructor. Is there any way around this?

build it in a different class and import it into this course. That removes the creator info. Alternately, create a "dummy" Instructional Designer account, and use that account for those kinds of creations.

Yeah...neither option is straightforward and nice like a checkbox, but it's the two options we've found that work.

Are you first creating the discussion topics in courses that reside in some kind of "Master" term within your Canvas instance? If so, even though you see yourself as the one who create those discussion topics in the "Master" term, it's my recollection that you would not see your name listed by those topics once the course has been imported into a new term (Fall, Spring, Summer, etc.).

In testing within our "Test" environment, if I edited a discussion topic that someone else had initially created (in this case, I clicked on the "Edit" button and the immediately clicked "Save" again...not making any edits), the discussion topic still listed the original author of the topic, but it added that the topic was edited by me.

The other suggestions are probably better than mine, which is untested, but in theory should work if certain conditions can be met. If nothing else, it may help convince you to go the other route.

You could add some custom JavaScript to the account that would look for when it's in a discussion and then fetch the instructor's information using the API and then replace the information that is there with it. You could also turn it into two calls -- fetch the person who is there and see if they're a teacher and if so, leave it alone. If they they are a designer, then change it.

A problem might happen if you have more than one instructor and knowing which one to stick in there. You could really mess with the students and put the picture of whichever teacher is associated with their section so it was customized for each student. That wouldn't work for us as teachers are put into the course not into the sections, but some schools do it the other way, I think.

There are lots of logistical issues to work out for anything but the simplest use cases.

That's why I say what others have suggested are probably a better way to do it. Besides, they actually know what they're talking about and I'm just thinking out loud.